


Perfect Clarity

by JazzRaft



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Fluff, Love Confessions, M/M, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-24
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-24 08:05:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17096957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JazzRaft/pseuds/JazzRaft
Summary: It took a thieving chocobo in the middle of Lucis for Noctis to finally realize what exactly it was that triggered his attraction to Ignis. The answer was in a pair of glasses. Or, in this case, the lack thereof. [for the ignoctsecretsanta2018]





	Perfect Clarity

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nychus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nychus/gifts).



> Written for the [Ignoct Secret Santa](https://ignoctsecretsanta.tumblr.com/) exchange over on tumblr! My recipient was [tarquainthefall](http://tarquainthefall.tumblr.com/), who asked for a sweet, getting together kinda fic. I hope this fulfills your fluffy, holiday feelings! Have a good one!

The first time he really noticed Ignis, through a lens of romance, rather than one of friendship, was when Ignis took off the lenses of his own.

It took Noctis _years_ to realize this; _years_ of awkward, tongue-tied adolescence and closeted feelings kept locked away from the invisible glare of the Crown; years of struggling to navigate the emotional minefield of having an untoward attraction to the man that was designed to be everything _but_ his boyfriend.

There had been this odd stirring in his stomach, at odder intervals of perfectly ordinary days. It flared up in the middle of studying reports, memorizing statistics for a conference, or squinting at graphs on computer screens. Always during the most boring, unremarkable minutiae of Iggy’s early attempts at tutelage.

It took Noctis until now to make the connection between Iggy’s bare face and those sporadic spells of not-quite-nausea. Now – when Ignis was in a near dire state of panic over the pilfering of his glasses – for half a decade’s worth of Noct’s nervous, churning guts to make a little more sense to him.

It had always happened when Ignis took off his glasses. For a fleeting, reflexive gesture of rubbing his eyes when they were tired, of dragging his hand down his face when he was annoyed, of rubbing the back of his wrist against the bridge of his nose to ease an itch when he was sick, Ignis took off his glasses to keep them safe from his barest, most banal of movements. He didn’t even think about it, as intrinsic to the gears of his basic motor functions as breathing.

And yet, it was all Noctis thought about now. If the eyes were the windows to the soul, then Ignis’s glasses were like closed shutters. They didn’t show who he really was inside.

This was the longest he’d ever looked at Ignis without his glasses on. It was hard to keep himself from staring, hard not to rifle back through every instance he’d been struck dumb around his own apartment and was never quite sure why. Hard not to frame Ignis’s face now, into the pictures of his old, private panics.

The glasses were like a screen between what Ignis was expected to be for Noct, and what Noctis wanted him to be, instead. Studious, stick-in-the-mud Ignis took off his glasses, and all of a sudden, he was just Iggy. He was softer than the straight edges of his frames, a little less sharp than the thin cuts of glass that glared against certain lights and blinded Iggy’s eyes from view, making him seem more mechanical, colder.

It was like his secret identity. Like a comic book superhero, standing right in plain sight – never looked twice – his glasses a mask for who he really was underneath.

Imagining Ignis stripping from his suit in a phone booth to transform into a superhero was not a conducive line of thought for helping him retrieve his glasses at present. Though, the black chocobo may as well have been the egomaniacal supervillain to Iggy’s super-powered sense of justice, given the ardor of his vendetta against the animal. Noctis was half afraid he planned on revenging himself by hunting down the endangered creature to have it for dinner.

“Of all the things they warn you about in outdoor survival training,” Ignis tutted later, after they’d escaped the evil chocobo’s lair with their treasure intact.

He inspected every, miniscule ridge and fault as they walked back to camp, squinting between the dappled spots of sunlight rippling through the trees overhead to make sure the spectacles were undamaged. Meanwhile, Noctis traced the freckles across the bridge of Iggy’s nose, watched the way it wrinkled in condemnation as he crafted every eloquent curse he could think of for the chocobo.

“Iggy?”

Noctis wasn’t sure he’d actually spoken until Ignis paused in his vows of eternal damnation to look over at him, open and expectant to the curiosity in his prince’s voice. He wasn’t exactly sure himself what he meant to say after getting his attention, reeling through his brain for an appropriate question to cover the wistful note in his throat which threatened to expose his attraction to him.

He nodded towards the glasses. “Why are they so important? I mean, you can see just fine without them, right? And you look fine without them…”

That part he hadn’t meant to say out loud. Years of careful concealment, of just skating the edge of how he really felt, barely letting himself acknowledge it, let alone give it voice – especially not to the object of his affection – and he was already letting it slip with his little mental epiphany for the day. Maybe Ignis wouldn’t interpret it that way. Maybe he’d just take it as a vague compliment between friends. Maybe Noctis could get away with it… If he could just shut his mouth and stop talking.

“I just meant that, y’know, style-wise, it works without them. Not that you don’t look good _with_ them, or anything, you look great, either way, um…” _Shit._

Every word was another foot of dirt in the grave he was digging for himself. Noctis blamed his failing inhibitions on the open Lucian air. There were no apartment walls to hide behind, no crowded arcades to vanish within and block his thoughts by putting his heart into the pixelated health icons on the top of the screen. There were no bright, neon colors to blast against his eyes until he was blind to what he shouldn’t feel, no blaring, robotic sirens of victory to deafen him to his incoherent thoughts.

Outside the Wall, there were no walls; no boundaries for his feelings to smash against and recede to self-doubt. He was surrounded by open plains, deep woods, and the endless sea at the coast of Caem. Whether it was the limitless landscape, his own clumsiness, or maybe the terror of missing the chance to say what he really meant, like he missed so much when Insomnia fell, Noct’s heart ran away from him and galloped right up and out of his mouth.

Ignis watched him babble, his gaze unfiltered without his glasses to cover them. Nevertheless, Noctis still couldn’t see what he was thinking behind those sea-glass eyes, cloudy with indecision as he fiddled with the glasses in his hands.

“I wear them so that I can be at my best for you,” Ignis said, softly. “So that I can see perfectly clear.”

For a moment, Noctis thought he was choosing not to hear his awkward, half-confession of attraction; thought he was mortified by it, and just trying to sweep it under the rug so they could both forget it ever happened, and move on. Now was not the time for it. Not when Niflheim’s shadow loomed across the kingdom. Not when there was so much on the road ahead of them.

But a small smile darted across his lips as he looked down at the frames. “And… I’m rather fond of the name ‘Specs’ you gave me because of them. Would hate to lose it.”

Ignis fixed him in a stare, something he wasn’t saying in the leveled persistence of his eyes. Noctis really hoped it was a, “ _Would hate to lose you, too._ ”

“You’ll always be Specs, Specs,” he promised, batting away his sudden onset of nerves with the normal intimacy of nicknames to remind him that this was _Ignis._ He didn’t have to be nervous with Ignis.

“I fear I may not be worthy of it,” Ignis chuckled, folding the glasses to rest in the collar of his shirt. “It appears I’ve failed to see what’s right in front of me.”

That was the thing about Ignis. If he couldn’t see, somehow, he always _heard_ what Noctis was saying, even if Noctis himself didn’t know how to give it voice. A stuttered stumble through paying his friend a compliment over his physical appeal could have been laughed off, could have melted under the rivulets of heat causing delirium out in Leide… But Ignis had never dismissed his feelings, not about any little thing. He never took the easy way out. He let Noctis work through the knots in his tongue until he smoothed it out, came to his own conclusions.

“Listen…” Noctis sighed, curling his arms across his chest as they stood in the shade, searching the midday shadows for the right words to say. “I get that the timing couldn’t be worse. With everything that’s happened, that’s still happening, this shouldn’t be important, but… You’ve always been important to me. And I know we can’t date or do anything about it now, when everything’s so awful, so I don’t even know why I’m bothering with saying it at all…”

“Noct.”

Ignis’s fingers on his wrist were as soft as chocobo down, but the touch sent an electric jolt through Noctis, all the same. He clamped it down with the rest of his rambling words, braving Ignis’s stare. He was always able to finish what Noctis couldn’t, always seemed to understand his thoughts and make sense of them when Noctis failed to find the sense himself.

“Your feelings are important,” Ignis assured him. “ _You_ are important. To me.”

Ignis’s thumb turned, lightly, over the knob of Noctis’s wrist. It was so small, so delicate of a touch, barely even there… and yet, Noctis was mesmerized by it. He glanced down at the gentle orbit of leather glove over bare skin. Ignis must have misinterpreted his staring for discomfort, because his hand soon fell back to his side. He cleared his throat.

“I confess that I’m not entirely certain how to proceed from here,” Ignis said, retreating behind his mental textbooks of logic and propriety. “The circumstances of our travels are hardly ideal, it wouldn’t exactly be a conventional courtship, if that is, in fact, what you desire…”

“What do _you_ desire?”

Ignis paused, peering up from the books Noctis could just see him reading through in his head. But he didn’t have some clunky paragraphs to hide behind this time, bare-faced and unguarded in the privacy of the shade. It didn’t take long for Ignis to think over an appropriate answer.

“Only you, Noct. Always.”

Noctis smiled, and reached back for his hand, nursing the same, careful connection between them.

“Let’s start there.”

They had a lot to untangle, a lot that had previously been obscured between the two of them. But now, with no walls between them, no lenses prescribed for them to see through, they could both finally see each other in perfect clarity.


End file.
